Just Beyond Reality’s Edge: Kira Lynn Harris

In April 2009 Kira Lynn Harris debuted a new body of work in a solo presentation at CUE Art Foundation in New York. This article examines two site-specific installations in that exhibition: 2001, Mirror, which references Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Prism, Mirror, Lens, inspired by Samuel R. Delany’s landmark science fiction novel Dhalgren. While Harris’s large-scale Mylar-and-light installations often refer to the Light and Space artists of her native California, to Robert Smithson, to Land Art, and to minimalism and various other areas of art history, her work is studied here, for the first time, through the lens of Afrofuturism.